Unyarat Pornprakit (Unya) is the youthful chief executive officer of Jubilee Enterprise PLC, a diamond jewelry retailer. Since Unya became CEO in 2008, she has expanded the chain to 128 stores and grown the revenue to $400 million. She has managed to deliver record earnings for 12 straight years. Unya's father began the process of professionalizing and standardizing Jubilee Enterprises and diamond jewelry retail in Thailand. He introduced standardized pricing, store design and store-in-store concepts. Unya took standardization to a new level but with an eye to customer experience. She focused on employee training and new store concepts such as "islands" for freer customer interactions. Although she has been using data for a long time, she is now institutionalizing its use to manage the firm. Every morning her regional managers receive a report with her personal suggestions on what to do. She is also using data from in-store cameras to monitor the activities of salespeople and use data from the video feed to train salespeople. Will her managers and store employees accept such direction?
Many companies overestimate customers' appetite for sustainable products, flooding the market with offerings that don't sell. The reality is, social and environmental benefits have less impact on purchasing decisions than basic product attributes do. Consumers buy products to get specific jobs done, and only after they find something that will do that will they look for a product that provides some social or environmental advantage. Of course, that's only if they value sustainability. Not everyone does, and marketers need to recognize that. Some customers (greens) place a premium on it, some (blues) value it only moderately, and some (grays) don't care about it and view it skeptically. The three segments cannot all be approached in the same way. How sustainable product benefits interact with traditional benefits is also critical: They can have no impact on a product's performance (independence), diminish it (dissonance), or enhance it (resonance). Marketers need to follow different playbooks for independent, dissonant, and resonant products, tailoring their approaches to green, blue, and gray customers with each.
The Human Resources and Social Development Ministry (HRSD) was one of the largest and most important ministries in Saudi Arabia, with 22,000 employees serving more than 30 million customers and beneficiaries. The ministry consisted of four sectors - labor which served and regulated the private and non-profit sectors; civil service which served government entities and employees; social development which served disadvantaged groups; and shared services which served the three customer-facing sectors. The three customer-facing sectors had been separate ministries until they were merged, and still operated mostly in silos. A new minister appointed in 2018 determined that the ministry had to be transformed to allow it to play its part in meeting Saudi Arabia's Vision 2030 roles. He brought in Mohammed Al Jasser in 2019 as Assistant Minister for Shared Services to spearhead the transformation. Customer experience (CX) transformation was a key part of this. The case describes the initial phase of the ministry's CX transformation. It included creating a CX deputyship, putting CX strategy and governance in place, and carrying out pilot projects to address immediate problems and build support within the organization. The next phase of the CX transformation would be scaling up and implementing it across the ministry. The case discusses the challenges the ministry will face in this phase, including initiative fatigue, limited interest in improving CX, policy changes not aligned with CX, and fragmented service ownership. The case ends by mentioning two important issues for a successful CX transformation: Ensuring that the outsourcing of customer-facing activities, which was happening in parallel, supported this; and engineering a mindset and cultural shift among ministry officials. Although the first phase of the CX transformation had been successful, scaling up across the ministry would be challenging. How should Al Jasser and his team proceed to achieve this objective?
The CEO of Revier Cattle Company, Tom Revier, had been an innovator in sustainable farming and humane livestock practices for over two decades. He and his partner Paul Hillen are considering whether they should launch a branded differentiated product in the market, and if so, how they should position this offering. The product has definite advantages in taste, texture and consistency due to the consistent farming techniques. Although taste may be important for some segments of the market, there may be an opportunity to showcase the sustainability characteristics of the company's livestock care and handling and its humane and environmentally friendly aspects. The case delves into the end-to-end value chain to understand the opportunities and challenges in taking a brand to market.
Many sustainability initiatives focus on improving the sustainability of products and operations in legacy or adjacent markets or on achieving sustainability gains by exploring new markets with a more diverse set of products. This is a variation on the classic "where to play/how to win" strategy familiar to most executives. Fewer leaders, however, are exploring an important new frontier in sustainability, in which brands actively partner with customers to achieve ongoing impact. This article describes a practical framework for creating sustainability strategies that take into account both dimensions--markets and customer engagement. The model lays out the four key ways that legacy companies can nurture growth in their sustainability efforts.
When Covid-19 hit the US in 2020, the grocery retail industry underwent a greatly accelerated digital transformation as consumers' habits changed drastically in a matter of weeks. As Americans sought to avoid their risk of exposure to the coronavirus, the adoption of online grocery shopping, click-and-collect and self-checkout skyrocketed. By 2022, it appeared this shift was here to stay, changing the grocery business for the long term. Yet, while big supermarket chains were scrambling to capture this new wave of digital shoppers, Trader Joe's consciously decided not to invest in e-commerce or omnichannel solutions. The company doubled down on experiential retail, choosing to remain a pure brick-and-mortar player and to keep its stores low-tech. Can this maverick company maintain a competitive advantage by going against the macro-trend of digitalization?
Case B presents the choices the company made and the execution issues it confronted. It shows that the CEO put online revenue growth at the center of the strategy. He also used "test and learn" budgeting process to avoid investing too much in stores. The case enables participants to see how the CEO reorganized parts of the organization to drive strategy execution. This case clearly shows how strategic decisions are crafted, executed and modified. It demonstrates the execution challenges a firm might face when transforming in a competitive marketplace and shows the dramatic transformation and improvement in the firm's financials. It also shows the rare success of a retail digital transformation.
This case details the struggles of a traditional retailer (Matas) wrestling with the changing retail landscape. The Matas management team recognizes that the company's offline retail business is under serious pressure. Top-line growth has flattened, and bottom-line profitability has declined. The online market is expanding rapidly but is a tiny portion of the business. The team is aware that the company needs to grow the online business. However, this shift will be financially difficult because the margins for the online business are near zero and it represents less than 3% of total business. As the market leaders, whatever Matas management chooses to do will inevitably affect its core "in-store" business. The company needs the cashflow from the in-store business to pay dividends to investors. In this situation, the new CEO sets out three priorities (i) reignite store growth, (ii) build new growth paths, and (iii) grow online. Investors are unhappy with this direction and the stock has sunk to an all-time low. The question is whether this new strategy will enable Matas to survive or transform?
The Bank of New Zealand (BNZ)'s market share among Small and Medium Enterprises is declining. The new general manager discovers a pain point among SMEs - they are spending a couple of hours a day compiling information from different apps in order to manage their business. BNZ creates are new information portal with ecosystem partners called MyBusiness Live. This portal makes information available to SMEs in one simple dashboard. BNZ has to decide how to charge for the system and whether to make it accessible only to current customers (i.e., closed system) or also to non-customers (i.e., open system). It also has to deal with internal challenges (e.g., salesforce) regarding the new system.
Coesia was a privately owned group of industrial companies based in Bologna, Italy. The group went through a two-phase transformation journey when Isabella Serà gnoli became the full owner of the group. One of her first decisions was to name it Coesia, to symbolize cohesion and shared values among the group companies. Her vision was to build a professionally managed, value-driven, sufficiently diversified global group that would be sustainable in the long term. In 2010, Serà gnoli hired a non-Italian newcomer to the industry, Angelos Papadimitriou, as CEO. Six weeks into his tenure, Papadimitriou presented to the board an aggressive ambition of doubling the business by 2015. Achieving this ambition would require a second phase of transformation in terms of strategy, business model and organization. At that time, only one group company, G.D, was truly global. G.D. accounted for 62% of the group's revenues and 99% of its profits. However, it faced some market challenges and potential risks to its future profitability. Papadimitriou and his leadership team would have to develop an overall strategy to build a more balanced, diversified and global group while strengthening G.D. Coesia operated as a loose federation of independent companies each with its own structure, functions and processes. Aside from reshaping the strategy, the group would have to design a business model and an organizational structure to support its ambition of becoming a larger, more global group.
Despite initial skepticism throughout the company, by 2015 Coesia had achieved its "Ambition 2015" by exceeding the revenue goal of €1.5 billion. The company had created legitimate diversification beyond the tobacco industry, while at the same time significantly strengthening its competitive position in tobacco machinery. All the evidence suggested that Coesia's transformation had been a success. In mid-2016 a new goal, "Ambition 2020," was set with the aim of further doubling the 2015 business. The group had made the crucial choice of adopting an operating model that was referred to as the "strategic enabler" model. The enabler model ensured that the individual companies had significant autonomy and P&L responsibility. Functions such as HR, R&D, marketing and finance were created at group level to support the individual companies. A regional structure was added to enable the companies to access global markets. A Coesia identity and culture was also emerging. By the end of 2018, the group had expanded from 12 companies in 2010 to 21. The dramatic increase in size - both in terms of revenue and number of companies - brought new opportunities, challenges and dilemmas. The enabler model had delivered successful results, but the leadership team was reflecting on what, if any, changes were needed to make it scalable and efficient for a larger group.
The abridged case, together with the substantial video supplements, examines the marketing challenge of repositioning Swiss watch brand TAG Heuer in the digital era. It delves into the decisions taken by Jean-Claude Biver - the newly appointed CEO of the company - in his effort to create and execute a new strategy and to position TAG Heuer as an affordable luxury brand that would appeal to both traditional customers and the new generation. It begins by highlighting recent developments in the Swiss watch industry and then focuses on Biver - a celebrated icon of this industry. It offers a snapshot of Biver's resume and a glimpse into the marketing principles that he has applied during his remarkably successful career. The second part of the case addresses the emergence of a new product category - the digital watch, which many industry executives considered to be a major threat. TAG Heuer decided to enter the digital space and launched TAG Heuer Connected, in partnership with Intel and Google. Connected (and the series 2 model TAG Heuer Connected Modular 45) turned out to be a key pillar of the company's new brand strategy. It also acted as a springboard for experimenting with unconventional sales and marketing tactics.
Chennai Super Kings (CSK) was the most successful team of Indian Premier League (IPL) till it was banned for two seasons (2016-2017) in 2015. The match-fixing and betting controversy and the resulting lawsuit in the Supreme Court eroded the brand value of CSK from US$72 million in 2014 to $67 million in 2015. Since the ban, key CSK players had moved to other IPL teams, with CSK captain Mahendra Singh Dhoni becoming the captain of Rising Pune Supergiants, and key CSK players Suresh Raina, R Ashwin, Dwayne Bravo and Ravindra Jadeja joining Gujarat Lions and Rising Pune Supergiants. Since the ban, newer sports leagues have also emerged and gained momentum because of the Indian viewers' new and insatiable appetite for all sports ranging from traditional kabaddi, wrestling, hockey and football to the newer badminton, tennis, boxing, futsal and mixed martial arts. With sports viewership spreading farther and wider than cricket, IPL is in for tough competition to gain and retain eyeballs. Under these circumstances, the return of CSK in 2018 is a challenge in itself. What strategies should CSK management adopt to rebuild the brand? Should it hire more star players to jump start rebuilding the brand? What factors could jeopardize the successful relaunch of CSK? What activities should the team engage in to increase fan involvement? Learning objective: 1. To understand issues in the relaunch of a sports franchise, and the associated challenges; 2. To understand potential strategies for rebuilding a brand in the sports industry; 3. To apply marketing tools and thinking to the sports industry; 4. Understanding brand equity concepts, such as Keller's Customer-Based Brand Equity model; 5. To understand sports consumption and sports fan engagement.
The case, together with the substantial video supplements, examines the marketing challenge of repositioning Swiss watch brand TAG Heuer in the digital era. It delves into the decisions taken by Jean-Claude Biver - the newly appointed CEO of the company - in his effort to create and execute a new strategy and to position TAG Heuer as an affordable luxury brand that would appeal to both traditional customers and the new generation. It begins by highlighting recent developments in the Swiss watch industry and then focuses on Biver - a celebrated icon of this industry. It offers a snapshot of Biver's resume and a glimpse into the marketing principles that he has applied during his remarkably successful career. The second part of the case addresses the emergence of a new product category - the digital watch, which many industry executives considered to be a major threat. TAG Heuer decided to enter the digital space and launched TAG Heuer Connected, in partnership with Intel and Google. Connected (and the series 2 model TAG Heuer Connected Modular 45) turned out to be a key pillar of the company's new brand strategy. It also acted as a springboard for experimenting with unconventional sales and marketing tactics.
The automobile industry has been shaped by several inflection points, each signaling a dramatic shift. Since the turn of the new millennium, it has been caught in a wave of radical transformation. For auto majors, it is no longer about pursuing sales growth and higher margins through scale, international expansion and outsourcing. The very definition of what it means to be a car manufacturer is being challenged by four mega trends that are transforming the entire automotive ecosystem: (1) the rise of electric vehicles, (2) car sharing as the new form of ownership, (3) mobility as a service, and (4) connected and intelligent cars as a precursor to autonomous vehicles. These trends bring opportunities and threats that automakers have never encountered before. They are looking for ways to get in front of these trends, rather than being caught on the back foot with their business model disrupted. How should they respond? Can they form the right partnerships and innovative alliances to ride out the turbulent shifts? Learning objective: Identifying the disruptive changes in an industry. How can traditional companies deal with ongoing industry shifts? Jumping the S-curve requires unconventional thinking in addition to traditional business wisdom.